Answered by:

Windows 8 Pro (x64) hangs on welcome screen "Please Wait"

Question

Just this morning I was using windows 8 with no problems and had to restart for some reason or another, and when I came back to my PC I found that Windows booted normally until I got to the welcome screen where it would come up with my normal color scheme
and say "Please wait" it did this for so long that the lockscreen appeared, then for a split second my screen went black, then Please wait appeared again but for some reason it had the default blue color scheme, again this took so long the lockscreen appeared
but that was also the default picture, then it went crazy and started going black every other second constantly coming up with that same "Please Wait" screen. All very strange to me, I have never had such a strange issue..

Anyway, I am able to access all Safe Modes, whilst in safe mode I attempted to disable all services and startup programs, I restarted but this had no affect, so I'm back in safe mode (with networking). I can only assume that this is a driver related issue
or something worse since I have disabled every service and startup program.

I do have access to a fully functional Windows 8 Enterprise Eval. on a separate partition as well as Linux Mint (both are EFI OSs including my Windows 8 Pro). I've tried doing all the fun stuff like automatic repair (which failed) and System Restore (Which
coughed up a few errors and now tells me that I have never had a restore point, well, apart from the several that I had before it failed to restore to the point I asked it to originally -.-)

Sorry if I was a little long-winded, it's just that I am personally very surprised at this, it is the most significant bug I have ever seen in my life that is windows related, so help would be very much appreciated because if you guys can't help me,
looks like refresh time ;).

Microsoft is conducting an online survey to understand your opinion of the Technet Web site. If you choose to participate, the online survey will be presented to you when you leave the Technet Web site.